Pivotal announces new serverless framework

Pivotal has always been about making open source tools for enterprise developers, but surprisingly up until now the arsenal has lacked a serverless component. That changed today with the alpha launch of Pivotal Function Service.

“Pivotal Function Service is a Kubernetes-based, multi-cloud function service. It’s part of the broader Pivotal vision of offering you a single platform for all your workloads on any cloud,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new service.

What’s interesting about Pivotal’s flavor of serverless besides the fact that it’s open source, is that it has been designed to work both on-prem and in the cloud in a cloud native fashion, hence the Kubernetes-based aspect of it. This is unusual to say the least.

The idea up until now has been that the large-scale cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft could dial up whatever infrastructure your functions require, then dial them down when you’re finished without you ever having to think about the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider deals with whatever compute, storage and memory you need to run the function and no more.

Pivotal wants to take that same idea and make it available in the cloud across any cloud service.